Do rising rates of antidepressant prescription translate into lower rates of suicide? Evidence from 29 countries

According to media reports, trace amounts of antidepressants are now being found in the drinking water. Apparently the drugs get into the sewage water, presumably flushed down the toilet, and then they make it intact through waste water filtering and processing into the water supply. These miniscule amounts are not of clinical and public health importance, except as just another indication of the high rates of prescription of antidepressants in the United States and other industrialized countries. A 2011 data brief from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that antidepressant use in the United States had increased 400% from 1988 – 2008. Antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed drugs for persons aged 18 to 44.

Questions can be raised as to just what public health benefits are being obtained by this costly increase in prescription of antidepressants. Claims that widespread use of the newer antidepressants has decreased rates of suicide have found considerable support, but have been met with controversy. Just when all the press was describing the serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine(tradename Prozac) as a wonder drug, Martin Teicher and his colleagues attracted considerable attention with claims that the drug precipitated “intense suicidal preoccupation.” These observations were based on six cases. In hindsight, these adverse reactions were probably idiosyncratic and relatively rare and were not replicated in a subsequent meta-analysis of a larger sample.

In a recent PLOS One article, I joined an international group in examining whether a signal could be found that increasing rates of antidepressant prescription were having a payoff in decreasing rates of suicide in data obtained from 29 European countries. It had already been noticed that that an increase in antidepressant prescriptions had been occurring in the past decade, as well as an overall decrease in rates of suicide in most of these countries. But the question that we wanted to address was whether the two trends could be linked. Basically, we obtained administrative data concerning both these trends and examined them in ecological analyses, a study design that I will explain later in the blog post.

The strongest test of whether antidepressants reduce suicide would be a randomized trial, but there are practical limitations on such a study being conducted. Suicide is indeed a public health problem with devastating consequences to persons who commit suicide and their family members, and suicide carries a lot of associated social costs in terms of a wasted life. Yet suicide occurs infrequently enough that so that would be difficult to have a clinical trial that had sufficient statistical power to demonstrate an effect—that the intervention group had a statistically significant reduction versus the number of suicides occurring in the control group. Isaacson estimated that given the infrequency of suicide, a randomized trial would have to have a combined intervention and control group of 20,000 persons.

In the late 90s, US Senator Harry Reid nonetheless requested that NIMH solicit applications for a clinical trial that would test whether intervening with primary care physicians could conceivably reduce suicides in the elderly. Contrary to the myths about suicide, elderly males, particularly those living alone, are among the highest risk populations. Senator Reid had a personal stake in the matter. His father had committed suicide just after a visit to his primary care physician, and Senator Reid reasoned that if the primary care physician had been alert to his father’s mental state, his father’s life may been saved.

I was a professor in the departments of family medicine and psychiatry at the University of Michigan study and depression in primary care at the time, and I was approached by a NIMH program officer to submit a proposal responsive to Senator Reid’s requests. I was sympathetic to the senator’s concern, but I declined, telling the program officer that it would be unlikely a clinical trial targeting the vigilance of primary care physicians concerning risk of suicide would be able to show any effect. I calculated that typical primary care physicians would probably encounter a clinical situation only about every 18 months in which their actions could conceivably make a decisive difference in whether a patient committed suicide.

NIMH was nonetheless anxious to meet Senator Reid’s request, and so they funded a study that became known as PROSPECT, the Prevention of Suicide in Primary Care Elderly: Collaborative Trial. The study evaluated an intervention that involved putting depression care managers into primary care practices to improve the delivery of depression care to older patients, mainly antidepressants, but with interpersonal therapy offered as a supplement. In writing their successful proposal, the investigators realized that suicide could not be the primary outcome if they were expecting a positive trial. Instead, they selected a clinically significant reduction in suicidal ideation, that is, patient reports of self harm or thoughts they would be better off dead. This is a surrogate outcome, not the same as suicide, but maybe reducing suicidal ideation could be seen as a step along the way to reducing suicide. Of course, this depends on the strength of the relationship between measures of suicidal ideation and the patient subsequently committing suicide being sufficiently strong.

I have noted that expressions of serious suicidal ideation are relatively uncommon among primary care patients, with most endorsements not carrying much thread of lethality. So such self-reports do not really tell us much whether we are dealing with the likelihood of a death by suicide. That is the main reason why the United States Preventive Services Task Force does not recommend screening primary care patients for suicidality.

Belatedly, the PROSPECT investigators discovered this problem in the base rate of suicidal ideation, as I noted in a recent BMJ Rapid Response. The investigators had recruited 18 primary care practices and were screening patients for depression and suicidal ideation. They administered a standardized, clinician-rated measure of suicidal ideation, the Scale for Suicidal Ideation (SSI), and immediately discovered that that the primary care patients were not reporting much suicidal ideation. In order to salvage their trial, they changed their primary outcome to whether primary care patients endorsed any suicidal ideation versus whether they endorsed none. Thus, to be designated as having suicidal ideation, patients only had to indicate not having a moderate or strong wish to live or that they would leave life/death choice to chance rather than taking precautions to save their life. Still, when the investigators had collected baseline data from the 589 patients who were randomized with a depressive diagnosis, only about a quarter were rated as having endorsed any suicidal ideation whatsoever. And when actual results of the PROSPECT study were reported, only two patients, one in the intervention group and one in the control group who completed suicide. In effect, PROSPECT did not end up being about reducing clinically significant suicidal ideation and certainly not about suicidality.

Can we reasonably expect any intervention study to demonstrate a significant reduction in suicidality? The Nuremberg Alliance against Depression (NAD) got off to a promising start by implementing a multilevel intervention program in the city of Nuremberg with 480,000 inhabitants and used Wuertzburg with 270,000 inhabitants as a control group. The intervention involved providing primary care physicians with training and support in dealing with depression and suicidality, but also mobilizing community facilitators (teachers, priests, and local media), a public relations campaign and support for self-help activities. The outcome was whether there was a two-year reduction in the number of suicidal acts (attempted suicides plus completions) in the intervention versus control group. A significant reduction was indeed observed, but there were no significant differences between the two regions for completed suicides. The number of suicides in Nuremberg fell from 100 at baseline to 75 during the first and 89 during the second year of the intervention, but in the control region Wuertzburg from 58 baseline to 42 in the first year and 40 in the second year. Basically, high annual fluctuations in suicides in both regions swallowed any possible effect of the intervention. Figure 4 from the report of the NAD, which demonstrates this fluctuation going back to eight years before the trial was implemented, captures this.

So, keep in mind the bottom line as I discuss our study in PLOS One and call attention to the study’s limitations. Suicide is an important public health issue, but it is difficult to demonstrate any effects of an intervention aimed at reducing it. In conducting our study, our first aim was to determine whether we could detect an effect of the increased use of antidepressants on European suicide rates and to explore the plausibility of some competing explanations. Our second aim was to see if there was patterning over time, such that declining rates of suicide preceded or followed upon the increased use of antidepressants.

What we did

Our study was observational, correlating the trend in increasing rate of antidepressant prescription with trends in suicide across 29 European countries. We obtained data concerning completed suicides from the WHO European Region Health for All Database. Country level data for prescription of antidepressants were obtained from both the IMS and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) wherever possible, but for some countries only IMS data were available We standardized our measures of both suicide and antidepressant to control for size of population, yielding a standardized death rate (SDR) for suicide per thousand persons per day and defined daily dosage (DDD) per thousand persons per day for antidepressant prescription. The SDR is a nifty weighted average of age-specific death rates that allows comparisons between countries that differ in their age structure. The DDD allows comparisons across different antidepressants. We introduced statistical controls for alcohol consumption, unemployment and divorce and gross national product (GNP).

What we found

There were marked differences in suicide SDR/thousand persons/day rates across Europe, but also high consistency in those countries with the lowest and highest rates of suicide over the study period.

The greatest reductions in suicide rates tended to occur in European countries where there had been a greater increase in prescription of antidepressants.

Portugal was the only country where there was a positive correlation over time between antidepressant utilization and suicide. Perhaps this result might be explained by a lack of precision in the Portuguese suicide registry, with some overestimate of undetermined violent deaths at the expense of estimates of suicide.

The results held when the control variables were introduced.

Overall, our analyses indicated that for 15 years of data on average for the 29 countries included in our study, the use of antidepressants increased by 20% per year by the end of this time period for the whole study area and there had been an average increase of 40.33 units of DDD per thousand people per day. Over a mean period of 28 years the overall SDR for suicide decreased at a rate of .81% per year.

What does this mean in practical terms? For each additional person per 1000 population who receives a defined daily dose of antidepressant, the age-adjusted absolute risk of death from suicide in that 1000 population decreases by a small but significant 0.088 fewer deaths. Put differently, providing 650 persons at risk for suicide with antidepressants could save one life. While we cannot talk about causality, within the limits of our methods, our results provide an endorsement of a role for antidepressant prescriptions in reducing rates of suicide on a public health basis.

What were the limitations of our study?

There are lots of limitations to our study starting with it being an ecological study, which is

an epidemiologic study in which the unit of analysis is a population rather than an individual. For instance, an ecological study may look at the association between smoking and lung cancer deaths in different countries.

An ecological study can be distinguished from a case-control study in which we compare people who ultimately committed suicide to those who did not in terms of whether they had been taking an antidepressant. Ecological studies are subject to the ecological fallacy, if we are not careful in making interpretations.

The classic example of a potential ecological fallacy in suicide research is interpreting Emile Durkheim’s finding that suicide rates were higher in Protestant countries than in Catholic countries in terms of individual Protestants being more likely to commit suicide than Catholics. With only country level data, we could necessarily determine that some or all of the effect could be due to Catholics in Protestant countries being more likely to commit suicide.

We have potential for an ecological fallacy in our own study. The countries with the highest economic disruption and unemployment had the lowest rates of suicide, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the likelihood of an unemployed person in these countries committing suicide.

So, with epidemiologic studies, we always need to caution that correlation does not equal causality. Yet, further, with ecological studies we need to additionally cautioned that ecological correlations, and in our case correlations within and between countries do not necessarily equate with correlations for individuals.

We assume that the suicide recording procedures remained the same in the countries involved throughout the study period, that is, the criteria for deciding what is a suicide versus an unexplained death and the accuracy with which cause of death was being preserved. If it happened to be a period in which suicide was being destigmatized, relative rates of deaths being attributed to suicide could have been increasing.

It is possible that the long term trends is suicide reduction we picked up in our time frame were already occurring before the introduction of newer antidepressants and so the antidepressants cannot serve as an explanation.

We did not take receipt of psychotherapy into account, which is undoubtedly important, but cannot be so readily measured on a population basis

We only controlled for a limited number of confounding factors and missed a lot. For instance, the same period in which antidepressant prescriptions were increasing was also a period in which there was considerable campaigning to educate and improve the performance of primary care physicians in dealing with depression. We cannot separate out the independent influences of the increase in prescriptions and the increased priority being given to physicians treating depression.

Perhaps the most questionable assumption of our study is that we can assume much of a relationship between dispensing antidepressants and the right people receiving them in an appropriate dosage with appropriate follow-up. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, most antidepressants are dispensed in primary care, where routine care for depression is notoriously bad. We can assume that many of the antidepressants were dispensed without a proper diagnosis being made and many of the patients receiving them had little or no further contact with their prescribing physician. As many as 40% of patients receiving an antidepressant primary care get no more benefit than if they had would remained on a waiting list.

If we try to take these factors into account, and attach some credibility to our results, then improving the quality of routine care for depression in primary care can have an added payoff for reducing suicide. But just try to demonstrate that in an intervention trial.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Michael Thase and to David McDaid and Ricardo Gusmão from my co-author group for their comments on earlier drafts. However, all opinions expressed in this blog remain my own.

Conflict of Interest Statement: I served as a consultant to PROSPECT, but was not involved in the revision of the primary outcome of that study. I also served as external scientific advisor to the Nuremberg Alliance against Depression and to a decade of successor projects financed by the European Union modeled after it.

About James Coyne PhD

James C. Coyne, PhD is Professor of Health Psychology at University Medical Center, Groningen, the Netherlands where he teaches scientific writing and critical thinking. He is also Visiting Professor, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy & Aging Research, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Dr. Coyne is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, where he was also Director of Behavioral Oncology, Abramson Cancer Center and Senior Fellow Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He has served as External Scientific Advisor to a decade of European Commission funded community based programs to improve care for depression in the community. He has written over 350 articles and chapters, including systematic reviews of screening for distress and depression in medical settings and classic articles about stress and coping, couples research, and interpersonal aspects of depression. He has been designated by ISI Web of Science as one of the most impactful psychologists and psychiatrists in the world. His books include Screening for Depression in Clinical Settings: An Evidence-Based Review edited with Alex Mitchell (Oxford University Press; 2009). He also blogs and is a regular contributor to the blog Science Based Medicine and to the PLOS One Blog, Mind the Brain. He is known for giving lively, controversial lectures using scientific evidence to challenge assumptions about the optimal way of providing psychosocial care and care for depression to medical patients.

15 Responses to Do rising rates of antidepressant prescription translate into lower rates of suicide? Evidence from 29 countries

I love your work and was with you until you started to compare antidepressant use to suicide rates to draw some conclusions. I didn’t even have to read ‘limitations of study’. They were kind of obvious. Again, as a big fan, I was surprised to see you associated with this. If it was done by another researcher, you would have probably, thankfully written a book on ‘limitations of study’. (grin)
DJ Jaffe
Exec. Dir.
Mental Illness Policy Orghttp://mentalillnesspolicy.org

I’m sorry you are disappointed by this work, but I think I’ve been fair and pointing out its limitations. I clearly indicated that it was an ecological study and so we had to avoid the ecological fallacy of assuming it would predict what would happen at the individual level. I would welcome your suggestions for alternative interpretations of the data. How, also, would you evaluate public health strategies for addressing suicidality?

Finally, I have to ask: what if our group had undertaken this ecological analyses and reported a finding that we were unable to detect any signal that increases in prescriptions of antidepressants led to reduce suicides?

If your group was unable to detect any signal that increases in prescriptions of antidepressants led to reduced suicides, in my mind, it would mean no more or less than any other finding. The limitations of the study were too great.

It kind of reminds me of my own sordid past profession: Advertising. We used to say, “The big print giveth, and the small print taketh away”. What this study giveth, the small print tooketh away.

Well, somehow, with data from 29 countries with 514 million persons in 2009, many of us would have been given pause if we did not find an association, even if we knew ahead of time that the interpretation would be ambiguous.

I’m curious how this study interacts with the following meta-analyses showing antidepressant drugs as no more effective than placebo for mild to moderate depression symptoms. Since suicidal ideation is a hallmark of depression, would the administration of placebo have also reduced the rate of suicide?

“Conclusions: Meta-analyses of RCTs suggest that SSRIs increase suicide ideation compared with placebo but the observational studies suggest that SSRIs do not increase suicide risk more than older antidepressants. If SSRIs increase suicide risk in some patients, the number of additional deaths is very small because ecological studies have generally found that suicide mortality has declined (or at least not increased) as SSRI use has increased.”

Perhaps suicide death has gone down but suicidal ideation has gone up, maybe from better medical care for attempted suicide. Or maybe people on antidepressants think about suicide more but for some reason don’t follow through as much as people not on the medications due to some inhibitory aspect of the drugs.

“Conclusions In these high-risk patients, antidepressant drug treatment does not seem to be related to suicide attempts and death in adults but might be related in children and adolescents. These findings support careful clinical monitoring during antidepressant drug treatment of severely depressed young people.”

Anyway, thanks for your interesting research. It certainly is an important topic worthy of study.

The PLOS Medicine article claiming that antidepressants are no better than placebo for milder depression is deserving of a blog post in itself. But here are a couple of links to my earlier blog posts concerning comparisons of antidepressants to placebo done by some of the authors of the PLOS Medicine article.

I think we need to be concerned about relationships between antidepressant use and various measures of suicidality, but we also need to keep in mind the distinction between surrogate measures an actual suicides. In a recent blog post, I criticized a study that suggested high rates of risk of suicide among pregnant women because of their scores on a measure of “suicidal ideation”. The problem with measures of suicidal ideation is that they are not clinically efficient indicators of actual risk of suicide, tickly among primary care patients, with most endorsements of items are low or mild, the current context of a population not particularly at risk for suicide.

Concerns about use of antidepressants among young people come not from not from the numbers of suicides actually occurring during trials, but from behaviors construed has self-harm. I think these warrant concern, but the evidence is that the black box warnings placed on antidepressants have actually increased rates of suicide in this population.

Colleagues
Can we raise the level of skepticism about ‘ behaviors construed as self-harm” as useful predictors ?-where is the evidence that suicidal thoughts predict anything? yet they are a major component of Columbia ” suicidality” index. Further what about studies–as in follow-ups of ICU patients in poison control centers? These patients were hair breadth of completed suicide -yet over a 5 year period how many completed suicide?
Please look it up.
It used to be –Following Meehl and Rosen that it was common knowledge that predicting a rare event (say<5%) unless you have exquisitely reliable/valid measures–surely not the case here–that you get swamped with false positives.
They have a cost ,so far unmeasured , as to those labeled suicidal, for less han the base rate, in terms of expense and demoralization.

About Mind the Brain

Linking neuroscience research, psychological disorders, health and well-being. The Mind the Brain team follows. Click for full bios.

Shaili Jain MD is a Psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and Stanford Univ School of Medicine Researcher & Clinical Professor,@shailijainmd.

Adrian Preda MD is a Psychiatrist and Health Sciences Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine, @adrianpreda.

James Coyne, PhD, is a Clinical Health Psychologist, and a Professor of Health Psychology at University Medical Center, Groningen, the Netherlands where he teaches scientific writing and critical thinking. He is skeptical about hype and hokum in media representations of psychology, other science and medicine. @Coyneoftherealm

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